#CabernetSauvignon

Oct 27

WINE OF THE WEEK: Big Beltie Cabernet Sauvignon 2021, Pays d'Oc, France

£9–£10.95, House of Townend, Lush Wines, The Grape & The Good, The Whalley Wine Shop, South Downs Cellars, Richardsons of Whitehaven I'll come to the name and the label in a moment but, in case you're jumping to conclusions, this isn't a big belter of a wine. It's medium-full and pulsing with Cabernet Sauvignon energy and rich, sunny fruit. Think plum and cassis lightly brushed with aromatic, woody herbs, supple tannins discreetly wrapped in oak, and a flourish of bay-leaf sp

Aug 3

Penfolds French-ish Launches, the New Grange, the Fabled Bin 60A and More

When Penfolds launches its 2022 collection tomorrow, Thursday 4 August, it will include two French, or French-ish, still wines for the first time. Not Penfolds’ first French wines, because it launched three vintage Champagnes in partnership with Thiénot in 2019, and not its first northern hemisphere still wines, because it launched a Napa-Australian red blend last year, but the first wines from Bordeaux. Or more or less Bordeaux. Clarification in a moment. The two wines are P

Jun 2

WINE OF THE WEEK: Château des Fougères La Raison 2012, Graves, France

£16, Tesco I was planning to choose something that shouted summer more obviously this week, but along came a timely reminder that you don’t have to pay a fortune to get good, mature red Bordeaux. Where else do you get impeccable 10-year-old red wine at this sort of price? In fact, if you can get a delivery slot by June 6 and buy six on-line, you’ll get it at £10.50 a bottle, or £14 by the bottle for delivery by June 13. As far as summer goes, far from being a heavy red, La Ra

Mar 10

WINE OF THE WEEK: Ringbolt Cabernet Sauvignon 2020, Margaret River, Western Australia

£10, Tesco There aren't many areas that produce really distinctive regional Cabernet Sauvignon – pure Cabernet Sauvignon, rather than Bordeaux-style blends with Merlot and so on – but Australia has two of them, Coonwarra in South Australia and, thousands of kilometres to the west, the much more recently planted Margaret River in Western Australia, where the first vines went into the ground in 1967. I've written more about the differences between the two here, so let's go stra

Feb 14

Ornellaia Ups the Cabernet Sauvignon in its Newly Released 2019, 'Il Vigore'

Each year the estate director of Ornellaia in Bolgheri chooses a single word to describe the character of the wine and reveals it at the wine’s launch. The word Axel Heinz has chosen for the 2019, revealed last week, is il vigore – strength, power, vigour. Given that the current zeitgeist around wine is more about elegance, freshness and even lightness, a word more readily associated with the powerful, strong wines of the Robert Parker era, might seem a brave choice, perhaps,

Apr 13, 2021

Drilling into Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon with a Viognier guru

Louisa Rose, head of winemaking at Yalumba, where she has worked since graduating as dux from Roseworthy in 1992 Mention the name Louisa Rose in any wine circle and the grape variety Viognier won’t be far behind. Yalumba, where she is chief winemaker and has worked since graduating from Roseworthy in 1993, was the first to plant Viognier commercially in Australia back in 1980, but it was Louisa who put Australian Viognier on the global wine map and established Yalumba as a wo

Feb 4, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Solara Natural Organic Wine, Romania

£8.50–£9.99, Lekker Wines, The Solent Cellar, Twisted Cellar, Noble Green Wines and others* The eye-catching label is a word-free zone, so I've given the name the producer Philip Cox of Cramele Recas uses, but the back label calls it Solara Glou Glou Natural Red. A glou glou in Romania is a fruity, young wine to drink chilled, like a French vin de soif, and this is exactly that: a bundle of bouncy, fruity, unoaked freshness that cries out to be lightly chilled. But there's a

Sep 24, 2020

WINE OF THE WEEK: The Society's Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon 2018, Maipo, Chile

£7.50, The Wine Society In a tasting of 20-plus wines from The Wine Society that included, among others, an excellent Brézème rouge, Barolo, Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir (the two latter in the Exhibition range) and Shaw & Smith Adelaide Hills Shiraz, I wasn't expecting to be bowled over by the £7.50 Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon. But I was. Yes, bowled over. I'm not remotely suggesting it's on a par with those other four reds (variously priced between £16 and £26), but for sheer valu

Jan 16, 2020

WINE OF THE WEEK: Chateau Changyu Moser XV Cabernet Sauvignon Blanc de Noir 2018, Ningxia, China

£11.99 on offer, Ocado This is an obvious choice if you're celebrating Chinese New Year next week, but it's so much more than that: a true original, a Cabernet Sauvignon rosé of real concentration and character, initiated and produced under the close supervision of well-known Austrian winemaker Lenz Moser in the Ningxia region, 1300km to the west of Beijing on the fringes of the Gobi desert. It's bone dry, yet opulent in texture with succulent fruit (suggestions of strawberry

Sep 19, 2019

WINE OF THE WEEK: Wirra Wirra Church Block 2016, McLaren Vale, Australia

£9.99 (on offer) Waitrose; £10.11 (on offer) Ocado I've just done a captivating and illuminating tasting of 12 wines chosen as Australia's future icons*. Running freely across region, grape variety and style, themes emerged nonetheless: a focus on specific sites and vineyards, Australia's old-vine heritage, and low-intervention winemaking among others. There was an orange wine and other new-wave wines, but there were also some classics, which is where this week's wine comes i

Nov 1, 2018

A dazzling Penfolds Grange and much more: tasting the 2018 Collection

The launch of Penfolds’ 2014 Grange last month marked the release of the 64th consecutive vintage. I haven't tasted the first, the experimental 1951, but I have tasted its successor, 1952, which likewise wasn't released commercially, and I have twice tasted the first commercial release, the extremely rare 1953 Grange Hermitage (as Grange was called at the time): first in 2003, along with the next 49 vintages of Grange, at the fifth Rewards of Patience tasting in Adelaide; and

Oct 5, 2018

Château Lafon-Rochet 2006-2016: coming full circle

Ten years after returning to Saint-Estèphe to take the helm at the family's fourth-growth estate, Basile Tesseron showed the results at a tasting in London and then showed some vintages from his father's, grandfather's and pre-Tesseron eras over dinner Bottles at the ten-year retrospective tasting hosted by Basile Tesseron (right) at Berry Bros & Rudd Bordeaux classed growths vary their blends according to the vintage. Of course they do. Over time they may shift the emphasis

Dec 12, 2017

Antinori Guado al Tasso 1998–2011 and Matarrochio 2007–2011

This article originally appeared in The World of Fine Wine, issue 51 A tasting billed as a UK first is tempting by any standard, but when presented by Renzo Cotarella it is doubly so. Cotarella – he hardly needs an introduction – is CEO and chief winemaker of Antinori, a youthful 60-year-old who has been with the company since 1979 and says he has no understudy but a team of 40 technicians. “I think what will be very difficult in future will be a single winemaker and a single

Jan 26, 2017

WINE OF THE WEEK: Moser XV 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon, Ningxia, China

£10.99, Wine Rack I’ve chosen a new-wave red wine from China to mark Chinese New Year on Saturday. The alternative would have been a zingy, off-dry Riesling from Europe, the southern hemisphere or North America to match a variety of seafood, vegetable, dim sum, rice and noodle dishes, but I wanted to highlight the quality and style emerging from this vast new world of wine where Cabernet Sauvignon is king. This one, from vineyards planted around a dozen years ago in the fast-

Nov 17, 2016

WINE OF THE WEEK: Tanners Super Claret 2012, Haut-Médoc, France

£14.95, Tanners, tanners-wines.co.uk The name may sound a tad old school, but the wine, I’m happy to say, is not. It’s claret for sure, aka red Bordeaux, but it’s not the old-fashioned, weedy, thin sort that use to fuel gentleman’s clubs at lunchtime (and may still do, for all I know). It’s a supple, rounded blend of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon aged in barrels for a year to give a spicy oak softness to the mulberry and blueberry fruit, graphite and green pepper flavours. It

Apr 19, 2016

Penfolds Grange and Special Bins: a unique vertical tasting in Paris

Hosted by the Australian Ambassador to France at "an intimate dinner", it was billed as "the first ever monumental vertical tasting of Penfolds Grange and Special Bins". I was one of the ambassador's guests This article was published in Decanter magazine in late 2011 The last time I tasted 1953 Grange – I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to be able to say that – it was outshone by the 1953 Grange Cabernet Sauvignon. That was September 2003, in Australia, at the fifth Penfo

Dec 16, 2015

Festive Red Wines

Ten red wines to serve with the Christmas feast Wines listed in ascending order of price. I've given a UK stockist (or two) for each, but you can find other stockists in the UK and other countries on wine-searcher.com Cimarosa Carmenère 2012, Colchagua, Chile Crowd-pleasing, fresh, velvet-soft Carmenère with a typical, smoky, green-pepper edge to the blackberryish fruit. A match for turkey, but not up to goose. £6.99, Lidl Domaine Mas Barrau Cabernet Franc 2014, Pays du Gard,

Dec 2, 2015

What does a winemaker do when he doesn't like his own wine?

Marcelo Papa, winemaker for Concha Y Toro, Chile What a difference a year makes. It’s a statement of the obvious where wine is concerned, but this is a tale of two consecutive vintages where variation is not down to sunshine levels, rainfall, hail, diurnal temperature range, or any of the other myriad weather variables that affect or dictate the quality and quantity of grapes in any season. The difference between the 2012 and the 2013 Marqués de Casa Concha Cabernet Sauvignon